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Freedom and control in the knowledge society |
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this text is to focus on the concepts of knowledge, information, power, control and freedom and the dynamics among them in the scenario of the new networked and digitized society.
Knowledge and information are the heart around which new models of society are emerging and start to be recognized.
The fight between control and freedom has always been a good filter through which read human history.
Both control and freedom have to do with power: more control allows more power concentration, while more freedom reduces it.
In the networked and digitized society new opportunities both of control and freedom are offered.
Awareness is growing in the society about the fact that knowledge of people is the subject of control, then freedom of knowledge is becoming the new flag to wave.
It will be observed that, according to their nature, institutions tend to favour control over freedom.
Today laws about knowledge (copyright, patent, information, communication and privacy laws) allow control and concentration of knowledge, while the demand for new laws is growing in the society.
The knowledge society will be a free knowledge society or will not be at all.
Introduction
The purpose of this text is to focus on the concepts of knowledge, information, power, control and freedom and on the dynamics among them in the scenario of the new networked and digitized society.
Knowledge and information are the heart around which new models of society are emerging and start to be recognized.
The fight between control and freedom has always been a good filter through which read human history.
Both control and freedom have to do with power: more control allows more power concentration, while more freedom reduces it.
In the networked and digitized society new opportunities both of control and freedom are offered.
Awareness is growing about the fact that knowledge of people is the subject of control, then freedom of knowledge is becoming the new flag to wave.
It will be observed that, according to their nature, institutions tend to favour control over freedom.
Today laws about knowledge (copyright, patent, information, communication and privacy laws) allow control and concentration of knowledge, while the demand for new laws that enable more freedom is growing in the society.
The "knowledge society" will be a "free knowledge society" or will not be at all.
Knowledge and Information
Very often it happens that the words "knowledge" and "information" are used like they were interchangeable.
So, people talk about “information society” and “knowledge society” like if the two concepts would be similar.
But information society and knowledge society are different.
If we can say that we are living in an information society (as is a society where information is flowing very intensively) it is clearly evident that a knowledge society (as is a society where knowledge flows very intensively) has to be built: nowadays very few sectors of the society are experiencing the effects of a free flow of knowledge.
Knowledge is a human ability of the human beings. Human beings know how to build a house, to program a software, to write a book, to put on a t-shirt etc.
Who knows something is able to transmit his knowledge to other people using symbolic representations (languages) of the things he knows and he wants to transmit to pass information (written texts, speeches, images, gestures, etc.).
Information is the way through which knowledge is transmitted from one person to another.
Internet and the new networked and digitized society that result from it have dramatically increased the number and speed of information exchanges among people.
This fact is producing a paradigm shift, a real quantum jump in the growing of the knowledge of humanity.
This is a beneficial result that has to be fostered and not hindered.
Knowledge building
The process of creation of information useful to pass knowledge is the result of a process of continuous feedback and interaction among people.
When one interacts with others, he can test his ability to transmit his knowledge and, as a result, test whether he really knows a particular topic.
Individual knowledge grows in the process of defining the most appropriate language and information for the transmission of knowledge.
Interacting each other people can define a common language and agree a shared meaning for a certain information, fine tuning their mutual understanding.
Also from this point of view Internet has produced a dramatical change: the growing number and speed of informative interactions allows that the process of definition of new languages and information is much faster and easier than in the past.
The ability to make “concrete” knowledge creating information that the others can share is a result that constitutes in itself a further step in the knowledge creation.
Knowledge that can be communicated is a knowledge of all the community, as is knowledge that is shared by a group of people.
Free software is a very good example of community knowledge building that was dramatically fostered by the free use of Internet.
Ubuntu
"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others".
It's interesting to notice how difficult it is to translate this concept in one single English word. Then the word Ubuntu will be used to define this concept, poorly expressible in English language.
Human beings are naturally inclined to help each others and to teach what they know to the others.
Knowledge sharing is a fundamental need of human nature.
Ubuntu moves human beings to spread their knowledge and benefit humanity. Ubuntu attitudes of human beings about knowledge should be fostered.
It is difficult to deny that free software is the result of Ubuntu attitudes of people. Many free software developers, asked about the reason for releasing the result of their work under a free software licence, they answer that they do it because they feel this is consistent with their ethical principles.
Knowledge and reality
...Communication makes what we call reality...
...Our traditional ideas about reality are illusions that we keep accumulating for the major part of our every day life, even if we have to force facts adapting them to our definition of reality, and not vice versa. The idea that exists only one reality is the most dangerous illusion. Actually there are many versions of the same reality and some of them contradict each other, but all result from communication... (1)
Human beings create reality communicating and sharing ideas and giving them “legs to walk on”.
A similar idea is expressed by all spiritual traditions when they deny value to the reality like we perceive it. What we think to be reality is Maya, a shadow of our own minds.
Reality is a continuum. To know, human beings need to make interpretations out of the reality.
We can't know reality in itself (if such thing exists is not relevant for the purposes of this paper). In order to know we create and use mental schemes, real “maps of the reality” that we feel useful to understand it.
But once a “map” is part of human beings idea of reality, this map becomes able to forge reality. The new map resists to change and new facts tend to be interpreted according to it.
This fact has become dramatically clear for many people after 11th November 2001: those dramatical facts changed the world, or, better, our perception of the world and made possible things that would not have been accepted if the Twin Tower events would not have happened (i.e. the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars).
Free Software developers can easily understand this fact. They forge their “reality” (free software) day by day creating it cooperatively with their minds. This reality has been changing very fast in the last years: old free software improve and new ones are released continuously.
This fact gives to the free software developers a key to understand that human beings can create their own reality.
Knowledge and power
Power is the capacity to act and to cause changes in the reality.
As it was pointed out, the mental maps of people forge reality. According to this, “power” is also (and maybe mainly) “the capacity to forge the maps of the reality that people have in their minds.
Human interactions are fundamental to build knowledge, but, at the same time, they are power transactions: interacting each other we “fine tune” our mental maps, confronting ideas, looking for common languages and trying to convince each other (as is, proposing to others the adoption of our maps of the reality or listening to adopt the mental maps of the others).
Even this paper is an attempt to propose to the reader a map of the reality. The reader could feel empathic with it (he already had the same idea), or he could find it reasonable and will think about it (and perhaps, will enter into a change in his perception of reality in a certain period of time, when other inputs will convince him to change his mental maps) or he could just feel that this paper is just a mass of annoying words, that just don't fit his ideas and he will reject it and through it away.
Power concentration
If power is the capacity to forge the mental maps of people, concentration of power is concentration of the capacity to forge mental maps of people.
Media companies have a big power because are allowed to communicate to many people at the same time.
Concentration in the media market implies power concentration.
Internet, allows independent media to spread information then hinders concentration of power.
Copyright and patent laws, in the way they are shaped today, create monopolies on information (the copyright holder is allowed to exclude the others from using his creation, the patent holder can exclude the others from exploiting his patented idea).
Control of information is control of the mental maps and knowledge of human beings and therefore control of reality.
Because laws allow appropriation of information, they also allow control and then concentration of power.
Power concentration and institutions
Every subject in human society (human beings and institutions) interact with the others through power relations.
Institutions differ from human beings because they are medium of human power concentration and control: institutions allow to joint the power of many people toward the same goal.
Because of this feature institutions naturally tend to favour power concentration.
But this state of the things has a negative side effect: the more it is possible to concentrate power the more it is possible to limit freedom of human beings.
Then institutions tend to favour limitations of freedom of human beings.
That is why institutions tend to favour control and concentration of information.
In the ancient times control of information was achieved by censorship. More recently, when the print industry became a reality, the concentration of the media market also served the same scope.
Control or freedom ?
Is control good or bad ? Or, to which extent control is positive ? Where control should stop and leave space to freedom ?
These are complex questions and it is reasonable to expect that different people would give different answer (while wisest people would simply abstain to answer).
To analyse those questions, it is useful to focus on 2 more topics under the light of which, hopefully, these questions will appear with a different colour.
Institutions tend naturally to grow
Human beings have a natural tendency to growth.
Institutions participate of the same nature of human beings and they either tend to grow.
Human beings, on the other hand, have a natural tendency to incorporate themselves into institutions and to act for their purposes. This gives strength to institutions and allow them to grow.
Order or chaos ?
The growth of institutions generally is seen as a positive fact because it produces order.
Order is seen as positive, because it is opposite to chaos.
Centuries of bad effects of this idea (i.e. national power ideology, two world wars, past century totalitarianisms etc.) did not allow yet to unveil this false myth.
People are used to think that human history is a never ending fight between order and chaos, a fight for the dominance of human reason over the chaotic nature of the material.
Recent studies are letting us start to consider a new positive paradigm that stays between order and chaos: complexity.
Living creatures are complex, but also markets, societies are complex phenomena.
All complex phenomena share similar features. One of them is that they are composed by different agents that act independently, without centralised control. An other feature of complex phenomena is that they are able to react to their environment in an adaptive way and to find effective paths to survive and go further.
Free software, for example, is a complex phenomenon: it is developed by many people that act independently and it grows in a surprisingly adaptive way.
From this approach comes the idea that complexity is something better than chaos, but also than order: order is a “death” condition like chaos.
Freedom is the path to the growth of humanity
We saw that institutions tend to compress freedom of human beings according to their nature, but freedom is a condition that allow complex phenomena to grow.
The natural tendency of institutions to control human beings, concentrate power and compress their freedom, for the purpose of creating order, has to be hindered because causes a compression of the capacity of humanity to follow his path of growth.
The idea that the growth of institutions favours the growth of humanity is false. Institutions foster order. But complexity is better than order to foster growth of humanity.
The enormous potential of growth embedded in the networked and digitized society has to be profited allowing free interactions of human beings.
The knowledge society will not exist unless it will be a free knowledge society.
What is free knowledge
The free knowledge society is a society in which human rights prevail on control and concentration of power: every human being has the right to freely interact with the others and should be subject to the minimal control as necessary from others human beings and institutions.
Free knowledge means that human beings prevail on institutions: whatever allows power concentration and control over human beings limiting knowledge diffusion should be justified by a consistent reason for admitting it. The rule is freedom of human beings. Control is an exception and exceptions have to be justified.
Free knowledge means that human beings have the right to freely forge their mental maps and freely build knowledge interacting among them.
The free knowledge society is a society where a clear option for Ubuntu is made: human beings have the right to build knowledge and freely share it with the others.
Free knowledge is faith in life and in the invisible hand of the nature that will spontaneously let emerge the path of growth and development of humanity from the complexity of free interactions among free people.
Knowledge, laws and Ubuntu
Laws should be shaped in order to foster Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, present laws that regulate knowledge communication (copyright, patent, privacy, information and communication laws) are shaped more with the purpose of turning individual egoistic behaviour into community benefit than with the purpose of fostering Ubuntu.
These laws move around the idea that the market is the optimum way to turn egoistic attitudes of human beings to be beneficial for the society: the market is the medium by which, competing, people are forced to produce the best for the benefit of the society.
Never less the possible benefit for the society, it is a fact that these laws foster egoistic behaviours and hinder Ubuntu behaviours.
For example, copyright and patent laws disfavour Ubuntu because foster the idea that appropriation of information is a good think.
The idea that these egoistic behaviours are “the right way”, sticks in human minds, becomes a dominant mental map and therefore creates a reality whit more egoistic behaviours and less Ubuntu.
Human beings know through their mental maps and their mental maps are forged by experience and the features of the environment. The way laws are shaped are therefore a crucial factor because they influence the mental maps of people, and then reality.
There are features of the laws that, if adopted, would foster freedom of knowledge, while, in the other hand, there are present features that hinder freedom of knowledge, and therefore Ubuntu.
It's interesting to notice that nowadays we face strong tensions in all the areas of the law that have to do with knowledge (copyright, patent, information, communication and privacy law).
Conclusion
The free knowledge society is a long way to become a reality.
Present legislations threaten this new promising dream.
In the past years, at the dawn of the new networked and digitized world, freedom of the unregulated frontier showed the hope of a new free knowledge society: a society where Ubuntu behaviours are welcomed.
But the possibility to get this dream to become reality passes through the change of the laws and the metal maps of the people that are becoming connected.
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NOTES
[1] - Watzlawick, p. 3
